Days of the Week

I’m sure someone reading this can recite the origins of the calendar, but I can’t. This morning I’m just feeling grateful for the person who decided to mark off the days of the week so we can count down until Friday. FRIDAY! It has never felt as good as it does today! This has been a long, cold, challenging week in kindergarten.

My only complaint about the calendar is with the names. Why couldn’t someone see into the future and realize that having two “s” words and two “t” words would be confusing to children? We are looking at the end of the semester here and I still have three children who cannot recite the days of the week and five children who cannot recognize the days of the week in isolation. It is always Tuesday vs. Thursday, and Saturday vs. Sunday, that creates a problem. I point out the differences in the words. I remind them to look for the “Th” and the “Sa”, but that isn’t helping. I even have cards in different colors and they haven’t picked up on the fact that Thursday is purple and Tuesday is pink!!! Yesterday one of my darlings had calendar duty and said it was Saturday, November 30!!!!  Why teachers get gray hair.

Next week we are giving a major standardized test. It’s one of those “open your booklet, fill in the bubbles” tests. I have to separate my students and cover their work areas so they don’t copy from each other. We will work in 15-20 minute increments with play/rest breaks in between. It takes at least three days to give the whole test. At least three children will undoubtedly be absent and I will have to spend Thursday and Friday trying to give them the test during odd moments.

I can tell you right now that one of my students will scribble all over the pictures in the test. Another one will fill out at least two bubbles for each answer- just because the bubbles are there. Another one will circle the answers instead of filling in the bubbles.  Several of them will skip at least half of the answers because they will be watching their peers, looking out the window, adjusting their shirt sleeves, and tapping their pencils. One will get an almost perfect score, except for the last section of the test. Three others will have difficulty with the second section of the test. The rest will muddle through. Why do I have such wonderful ESP? Because I’ve given this test twice each year for six years.  And I know my students.

So…today is Friday. Jeans day. Centers instead of tutoring. Good weekly reports for most of my class. No testing today. It has to be a good day, right?

Comments

[Marilyn Crabtree]

Right!!